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Saturday, September 8, 2012

The Pipe-dream, and Problems that Arise from it

THE IDEAAt
Plimoth Plantation last November, several friends and I were between visitors
and very bored. Massachusetts in the late fall doesn’t really encourage one to
wander around outside, even in replica Pligrim clothing. Once the sun starts to
dip towards the horizon and visitation dries up, everyone starts to congregate
in three or four houses throughout the Colonial English village, and compete to
see who can huddle up closest to the hearth without actually setting their
clothes on fire. This particular day, a group of us started talking about what
we would do if we were to find ourselves suddenly handed a blank check and told
to use the money to create our own living history museum. Ideas were thrown
around. Things got messy.Fake
John Alden suggested a first-person Pirate museum, somewhere down in the
Caribbean. His fake wife Priscilla liked the idea of a Victorian house designed
to showcase the history of the Spiritualist movement, complete with a séance.
Someone else wanted to design a Revolutionary fort. Having just days before watched
the classic Sergio Leone film “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” I began to think
about the possibility of a Wild West living history museum, where the
first-person interpreters would all portray cowboys, gunslingers, and saloon
keepers.

THE
PROBLEMThis
all started out as idle conversation, of course. But as November dragged on, we
Pilgrims found that we would get a large rush of school groups in the morning,
all of them eager to talk about Squanto and the first Thanksgiving. By the
afternoon, these groups would be back on their warm school buses, and we would
once again be huddled around our fires, talking to pass the time. And we began
to expand on our original ideas. Given the opportunity, how would we organize
these museums? How would they teach us about history? How authentic would they
be?This
last question is one that living history museums struggle with constantly. The
whole idea behind first-person interpretation is to immerse the visitor in a
different world, a different time period. You’re half historian, half actor,
and you play your role without a script. You dress, work, and eat the part, doing
most activities in the same way that the people you represent would have done
them. But sometimes the 17th century is just too… extreme for a modern person. A New
Plimoth resident in 1627 would have relieved themselves into a clay pot the
size of a tea kettle and then chucked the contents into the streets. If a
museum today tried to be that authentic, the Department of Sanitation would
close it down and chuck the staff out
into the streets.A
Wild West museum comes with its own set of problems; some very similar, some
completely unique. Chamber pots and outhouses would still have to be present,
for the sake of appearances, but the Muzees would probably choose to use modern
facilities, cleverly hidden in a barn or something. There would still be the conundrum
of nineteenth-century prejudice; how authentically should the interpreter portray
period attitudes towards women, African Americans, Native Americans, and other
frontier minorities? How much affected bias can you get away with for the sake
of education? How much should you be
able to get away with?Then
there’s the constant balancing act between authenticity and the pop culture
perception of a period. I guarantee that if this Wild West museum ever becomes a
reality, every male staff member I hire is going to have seen the same Clint
Eastwood films that I have, and they’re all going to want to be the Man with no
Name. Given the chance, everyone is going to pass up roles as blacksmiths,
telegraph operators, missionaries and common laborers. They’re going to dress
up in a white hat and a poncho, and spend their days playing poker and ogling
prostitutes at a saloon. A Most visitors would probably want their Wild West
museum to have a daily event where gunslingers face off in the main street at
high noon. Tumbleweeds blow by, revolvers are drawn, in a life and death contest
to find out who’s the faster shot.These
are issues that every living-history museum must face, where the educational
experience you’re trying to present must compete with the expectations of the
public that finances your operations. And they’re issues that must be
revisited, year after year, to determine whether your mission is focused more on
changing a perception, or catering to it.Come
back in a few days to read more about my
vision of a living history museum devoted to the Wild West. If you can’t wait
that long, visit this site to see how an existing museum in Kansas has
recreated one of the most recognizable periods of American history.

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About Aaron M. Dougherty

Aaron is a 2010 graduate of Eastern Michigan University's Master's program in History, with an undergraduate degree in History and Writing. Since 2010, he's worked as a writer, researcher, and historical interpreter for several museums and historical societies in the greater Boston area. Writing this blog is MOSTLY for fun.